Poetry, Emi Wood Scully
Approximately 799 miles away from home
you turn up.
Crowding the deck;
Peering between slats
with your tribe: Heliantheae.
Family name: Asteraceae.
Ray and disk florets
benefit from pruning
to encourage further blooms.
Variegated blossoms.
Petals like a tie-dye t-shirt
purchased at Merle’s
with unearned money.
Blooms: the embodiment of teenage drives
through quiet country roads.
Blaring mixed tapes of the Dead
down lonely Guilford streets
In the summer.
Every so many miles
a Cape or Saltbox;
Offering mason jars
filled with small bouquets of you.
Tied loosely with thin burlap.
Cost: free.
A backdrop of faded buntings
draped outside of front windows,
leftover from the holiday.
Thank you: Johann Gottfried Zinn
for these thoughts of freedom
and burgeoning encouragement.
A silent remembrance:
the recklessness of youth
and eventual maturity
from the periphery inward.
Sitting out back
on this hot July evening
I feel akin to your beauty.
I, too, am somewhere in-between
Containing numerous rows
and a visible center.
Distracted by covert dahlias;
Perplexed by pushy cosmos
Poppies: stalled.
Emi Wood Scully is a fourth-year PhD Candidate in Literature at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a budding Virginia Woolf and James Joyce scholar. When she is not working on her dissertation, you can find her: painting and drawing, singing, and trying new vegan recipes. You can read some of her published poems on her website: http://emiwoodscully.com/.